"I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type"
About this Quote
Speed becomes a kind of aesthetic in Sharon Olds's line, and not the glamorous kind. "I didn't have time" lands like a small confession that doubles as an accusation: the world she lives in doesn't grant poets the luxury of curation, only the pressure of output. The sentence is plainspoken, almost apologetic, yet it quietly resists the romantic myth of the poet as leisurely artisan arranging a life's work with tweezers. Olds frames writing as something done on the run, in the cracks of a day, where attention is constantly being bargained away.
The bluntness of "sit down" matters. It's the physical posture of reflection, the privilege of stillness. She denies herself that posture, and the denial reads less like personal failing than like a condition of modern (and often gendered) labor: caretaking, teaching, earning, surviving. Then comes the kicker: "look at the work of a year and choose". That's the glamorous part we associate with authorship - selection, taste, authority. Olds undercuts it with "what to type", a phrase that collapses vocation into mechanics. Typing is not inspired singing; it's repetitive motion, clerical, time-clock work.
The subtext: sincerity doesn't need polish, and a poem's urgency can be truer than its perfection. Olds has long written from the pressure points of lived experience - family, sex, anger, tenderness - and this line defends that project. It suggests a poetics of necessity: writing as triage, not museum practice. In an era obsessed with branding and "best-of" highlight reels, her refusal to curate becomes its own integrity.
The bluntness of "sit down" matters. It's the physical posture of reflection, the privilege of stillness. She denies herself that posture, and the denial reads less like personal failing than like a condition of modern (and often gendered) labor: caretaking, teaching, earning, surviving. Then comes the kicker: "look at the work of a year and choose". That's the glamorous part we associate with authorship - selection, taste, authority. Olds undercuts it with "what to type", a phrase that collapses vocation into mechanics. Typing is not inspired singing; it's repetitive motion, clerical, time-clock work.
The subtext: sincerity doesn't need polish, and a poem's urgency can be truer than its perfection. Olds has long written from the pressure points of lived experience - family, sex, anger, tenderness - and this line defends that project. It suggests a poetics of necessity: writing as triage, not museum practice. In an era obsessed with branding and "best-of" highlight reels, her refusal to curate becomes its own integrity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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